Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) enables enterprises to report, monitor and analyze their performance in an online environment. OLAP allows a user to drill down to identify product performance. Entity-relationship modeling specifies specific object types, such as “Product,” “Customer,” etc. In a relational model, the object types may be represented as names of relations, but may not have independent existence identification. As such, objects are indirectly identified and accessed through their corresponding attribute identification.
Entity-relationship modeling may also specify specific entities and relationships. In a relational model, identities of relationships may not have explicit representation, but rather recovered by executing query operations on the database.